Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

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Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

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Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

At the hour when our imagination and our ability to associate are at their height, we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading.

That transcendent stream is what London-based typographic fine artist Sam Winston and Belfast-born, Brooklyn-based artist and children’s book maestro Oliver Jeffers plunge us into with A Child of Books (public library) — a serenading invitation into the joyful wonderland of reading, extended by a courageous little girl besotted with books to a little boy timorous to take the dive.

As she takes him by the hand and gently guides him across the “mountains of make-believe,” over the monster-haunted castles, through the fairy-tale forests, his fearful reluctance crystallizes into curiosity, which finally melts into a warm wonderment at this new world of words and stories.

An homage to literary classics carries the story as an undercurrent of affectionate appreciation for the way in which literature carves our interior landscapes. Jeffers is no stranger to appropriating existing art in original storytelling. Here, his unmistakable illustrations animate Winston’s landscapes, crafted from the texts of classic children’s stories, nursery rhymes, and lullabies — typographic topographies composed of multigenerational cultural treasures like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Frankenstein.

What emerges is a jubilant paean to books as participatory engines of self-discovery, self-creation, and self-transformation — a supreme testament to Susan Sontag’s unforgettable Letter to Borges, in which she asserted:

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence… a way of being fully human.

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Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

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Sunday newsletter

Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

midweek newsletter

Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

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